An excerpt from Disabled Ecologies.
The multicolored poisonous waste disposed of by Hughes Aircraft Company was never just TCE, the most infamous ingredient. It was always a toxic soup: dozens of volatile organic compounds and heavy metals, contaminants with names like dichloroethylene, chromium, cadmium, and benzene. The chemicals were used in the early 1950s in the manufacture and cleaning of missiles that would travel thousands of miles overseas to maim and kill people during the Korean War. Back in Tucson, these chemicals would be dumped unceremoniously in pits or along fences that bordered the Hughes site, or sold to laborers to resell to businesses and individuals across Tucson. Eventually the waste was dumped in enormous unlined lagoons, which would overflow, stressing and killing the mesquite and cottonwood trees and other plant life in the area. Wildlife drank from the open pits and perished. Tohono O’odham representatives from the neighboring San Xavier Reservation protested the pollution on their land, which arrived when rainwater flowed through the desert arroyos, taking the contaminants with it. Their cattle would drink the water, become sick, and die.
The movement of waste was also happening below ground. The pollution sank downward through less than a hundred feet of porous earth, entering Tucson’s regional aquifer and altering the chemical makeup of the groundwater. Traveling northwest, the pollution entered the sand, gravel, and clay that made up the aquifer’s geological matter, moving with gravity toward the north-flowing Santa Cruz River. Before the contaminants could reach the surface and enter the water aboveground, they reached municipal and private wells where they were pulled up and distributed across Tucson’s southside, an area that grew steadily through the 1940s–1960s as a racially diverse population sought secure employment. The “TCE plume,” as it came to be known, eventually reached out five miles from south to north and three-quarters of a mile east to west (refer to earlier map 2).
By the 1970s, residents began to notice their plants died when they watered them. Their dogs and cats and farmed animals became ill. Many people were diagnosed with rare illnesses: lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, leukemia. Babies were stillborn or were born with congenital heart impairments or other disabilities.
During this decade the white population in the area had begun declining, while the Hispanic population grew swiftly. In the 1980s, when the pollution finally came to light, southside residents endured years of racist accusations that their conditions were their own fault. As alarm grew and suspicion fell on the lagoons, Hughes spokespeople and Pima County health officials stated at public meetings that although people in the area were disproportionately becoming sick, it was not a result of pollution. They were, according to city officials, “genetically susceptible to illness,” given to poor reproductive choices, and suffering the consequence of poor diet and lifestyle. Community members vividly remember that at one public meeting city officials blamed the southside’s illnesses on “the chilies and beans they ate.” 5
Although the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program eventually began to oversee various groundwater treatment facilities in Tucson in the 1990s, the thousands of people made sick did not receive treatment. Environmental remediation, city, industry, and EPA officials made clear, ended at the threshold of the human body. Southside community organizers, on the other hand, had a far more capacious understanding of what remedial action should include, one that was shaped by their experience as people of color living with illness and disability. For three decades, ill and disabled southsiders would articulate a vision of justice that included treatment for both human communities and landscapes and that acknowledged long histories and potential futures of injury. And, at least at times, they were able to make these visions a reality.
These are but some of the trails that can be followed in what I have come to understand as the disabled ecology of the southside’s defense industry plumes.6 This book traces these trails to explore how disability is understood in environmental contexts and for what ends. In these trials, we can see disability as bodily injury impacting many species. We can see the way that injury is shaped by social inequality. We can see disability as a lived experience leveraged to provide evidence of harm and wrongdoing or, in contrast, as a moralizing concept utilized to direct blame back onto the injured themselves. We catch a glimpse of disability’s legal and bureaucratic meanings, and alternatively, its potential for solidarity building. In following these trails, we can identify the political and material consequences of disability on human and more-than-human life and entities. We can uncover how disability manifests rhetorically, politically, and materially among organ-isms in relationship to their environments.
Disability representation has long been ubiquitous to environmentalism. Yet it has most often been invoked simply as a potent symbol—a “cautionary tale,” as disability scholar Eli Clare calls it—to expose the depth of a particular environmental or social crisis.7 As Jina B. Kim describes, in environmental justice sociological studies, “Disability is constituted as a feature of environmental racism, but it’s treated simply as a transparent measure of inequity.” 8 Within this frame, disability and illness become ways of representing what Rob Nixon has termed slow violence, the severity of crises that may otherwise not be visible (like the toxic groundwater in Tucson).
While this analysis is critical, it is only part of the story. To better understand the role disability plays in shaping environmental racism and environmental violence more broadly, there are other questions that need to be asked and explored. For example, how does ableism lead to and perpetuate both the causes of environmental injustice and the myriad responses to it? Why is disability mentioned in passing but rarely taken up as a central category of social and political analysis within environmental disciplines? Environmentalists rarely stay with disability long enough to even ask how people and environments coexist with injury, let alone how this living-with generates particular values, politics, and modes of engagement.
Sunaura Taylor is an environmental activist and author of Disabled Ecologies.
